In the Agile Manifesto, the statement,"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools," declares relative value from the perspective of the signatories. In other development environments, processes and tools may seem to command a lot more attention than people. A people versus process discussion may polarize many participants.

This post explores a potentially more polarizing idea:

"In New Product Development (NPD), processes are incidental to the value stream" (1)

From Wikipedia:

Value Stream: The an end-to-end business process which delivers a product or service to a customer or consumer. The process steps along the way may both use and produce intermediate goods, services and information to reach that primary end.

Analysis may suggest the removal of intermediate process steps, goods, services and information that do not move the value stream forwards to its primary end, provided they do not serve important secondary ends such as compliance, quality control or employee loyalty.

Initially, the value is realized at launch when people begin to interact with your new product.The value depends on the user experience with your new product. For the most part, customers don't care too much about your processes.

Speculative Products and Speculative Processes

In NPD, most projects begin as speculative product concepts. A speculative product is not developed for a particular customer and there are no guarantees that sales will be abundant. Your 'finished' product may not have a great product/market fit. If your product doesn't have traction in the marketplace, an expensive advertising campaign or extensive public relations effort will be inefficient.

The product concept is speculative. The processes used to commercialize the product are more speculative even if it is implied that the processes are aligned with 'Best Practices.'

Incidental

Incidental doesn't imply unimportant. 

It is a reminder that NPD is a multi-variable problem and the desired primary output is value in the economic domain. Sometimes contributors to NPD get distracted by proxy variables such as waste, cycle time, variability, efficiency, and unit cost and processes. (2)

In new product development, mobilize your team to delight customers and incidentally you can publish the results on your brilliant processes that facilitated your success. 

Acknowledgements

1. The title of this post was inspired (in part) after viewing a presentation by Hal Macomber on Target-Value Design at the UK Lean Conference in 2009.

2. According to Don Reinertsen, the goal of NPD is to maximization of life cycle profits.

If you intend to employ more social media in your new product development (NPD) efforts, it may be helpful to begin by re-evaluating how presentations are delivered within your organization.

At the Web 2.0 Expo in November 2009, the keynote presentations were enhanced using a live Twitter feed generated using a publicized hashtag (#w2e) and multiple WiFi access points for the audience. 

I suspect that some of the Presenters were more comfortable with the established paradigm of delivering a monolog with a prepared set of images in a darkened room. 

The addition of a live Twitter feed provided a public sampling of the realtime conversation within the audience.

What was revealed in the conversations?

Some tweets contained simple status information such as "The presentation is starting now." Commonly, audience members posted quotes from the presenter. Other tweets contained supplemental information such as 'The link for more information is ...' Occasionally, the tweets were fact checks. A few tweets contained a surprising insight or humorous anecdote.

Capacity problems

Because so many people were attempting to use the WiFi, the system was overloaded. Joel Spolsky has an excellent post on "The WiFi at Conferences Problem." Additional suggestions are in the "Why is Interet access and Wi-Fi always so terrible at large conferences" discussion.

Benefits of having social media during a presentation 

The addition of hundreds of tweets during presentations provided:

• Richer experience for the audience. Potential for more excitement and greater engagement.
• Realtime evaluation. When the presenter was motivational, the content of the tweets reflected it. When there was too much superficial content, dissatisfaction was registered in the tweets. The absence of feedback signaled that the audience was distracted and likely to be using the WiFi connection for other activities.
• Disintermediated information. Instead of a dashboard summary, the raw text is available.
• Traceable sources. Tweets are not anonymous. Authorship is revealed.
• Analytics. The tweets can be reviewed after the presentation to extract other information.
• A multi-perspective summary of the event.
• Feedback for the presenter. Opportunities for realtime adjustments. Insights for improving future presentations. 
• Feedback for the event planners that complements survey information and subjective assessments.

After experiencing the enhanced presentations last month, it will be difficult to accept another dull PowerPoint monolog in a darkened room.

Don't feed the trolls (DNFTT)

During the Web 2.0 expo, the feed generated from #w2e (the publicized Twitter hashtag) was moderated. There was a mechanism to remove inappropriate comments before they were displayed on the big screen. Trolls were thwarted.

Implications for new product development

There seems to be a growing urgency to add social media capabilities to new product development efforts. The budget for social media capabilities has been increased in many organizations. Now, 'Social Media Strategist' is a job title. This is reminiscent of the job title 'Web Master' from the 1990s.

It will take more than adding Web 2.0 capabilities to your site and devoting resources to your Twitter effort to maximize the effectiveness of your development efforts. It will require more than mastering the jargon.

Perhaps one way to gain experience using social media is to evolve the established presentation paradigms to empower new communities and improve open innovation.

This is possible because social media provides a great method for listening. Likewise, new product development benefits from listening as the product evolves from a concept to a commercially viable solution

In the conclusion of the 10-part series on Detrimental Connotations in New Product Development - Collaboration, opportunities for collaboration are explored. Opportunities for collaboration include the following interactions:

• Between individual contributors
• Across functional groups
• Agents (something that acts within the system) whose contributions focus on different portions of the development effort
• Individuals and information

This post address improving NPD environments and especially those embracing Web 2.0, social computing, NPD 2.0, co-development, open innovation, or geographically dispersed (virtual) teams concepts. It explores the concepts of neural networks and complex adaptive systems in NPD environments.

It concludes with "When your connotation of collaboration enables you to create an NPD culture that facilitates synergistic interactions among individuals and across functional groups as well enabling better insights from information throughout development, your potential for innovation will improve."

This post explores the phrase 'breaking down the silos' and presents alternative strategies that include the concepts of refactoring, networking, neural networks, and complex adaptive systems to improve the effectiveness of new product development (NPD).

Some individuals accept the admonition to 'break the silos' as 'good advice.' Other individuals have the expectation that the process of 'breaking down the silos' will be accompanied by an unpleasant disruption of current workflows and a dilution of effort.

The function of a silo

Outside of NPD, some silos are recognized as beneficial. Farmers use enclosed structures to store grain. The military uses them to shelter missiles. 

Are there beneficial silos in NPD? If so, silos that produce the intended results should be preserved, nurtured, and improved.

Common usage of the phrase 'breaking down the silos' in business environments

In the United States, the phrase 'breaking down the silos' has become synonymous with removing barriers in business environments. The typical intent of this generic prescription is to remove barriers within hierarchical organizations.

Within many new product development environments, the phrase 'breaking down the silos' has the connotation of removing barriers between functional groups to enhance cooperation. In such cases, the implication is that the removal of these barriers will improve the organization's performance.

Examples of detrimental conditions between functional groups include:

• Problems exchanging information
• Problems sharing and creating knowledge 
• Disagreements about priorities
• Slow responses due to internal bureaucracy

In this hierarchical organization diagram, the vertical segments of the organization chart resemble the physical silos in the preceding image from a farm. Formal communication between individuals from different groups may require the participation of their managers. Ideas may be collected and reviewed by a committee before some are implemented. 

In this diagram, four individuals are not designated as part of this NPD effort but are direct reports to managers that are assigned to the project. Two individuals do not report directly to a manager that is assigned to this project. Such inefficiencies may increase the administrative requirements without improving the NPD effectiveness.

Typically, context-sensitive solutions to remove barriers may include the adoption of:

• New processes
• New training programs
• New tools  

An example of a beneficial silo

Some barriers are beneficial.

One of the most effective silos I have encountered was an NPD group at Hewlett-Packard. This group developed many successful, profitable products. Group members had many opportunities to improve their skills.

The group leader was an R&D manager. He protected his group from interruptions and distractions. His desk was positioned at the entrance to the work area and he scrutinized every visitor to the area. He worked on many tasks that required interaction with Marketing so that his team could concentrate on their primary assignments. He protected flow. The Wikipedia entry for flow (psychology) includes: 

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity... According to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning.

Refactoring a silo

The phrase 'breaking down a silo' may have the connotation of indiscriminate destruction. The results of 'breaking down a silo' may have unintended consequences. Valuable qualities may be destroyed while removing detrimental barriers.

Instead of 'breaking down a silo,' consider the concept of refactoring. The Wikipedia entry for 'code refactoring' includes:

Code refactoring: the process of changing a computer program's internal structure without modifying its external functional behavior or existing functionality, in order to improve internal quality attributes of the software. Reasons include to improve code readability, to simplify code structure, to change code to adhere to a given programming paradigm, to improve maintainability, to improve performance, or to improve extensibility.

To improve the effectiveness an NPD team, consider ways to:

• Encourage effective interactions and minimize interruptions
• Maximize productivity and minimize rework
• Maximize knowledge creation
• Improve the level-of-mastery of team members

What refactoring techniques will be effective?

Network the silos

Before indiscriminately breaking down silos, analyze the beneficial aspects of each functional group. What are the potential detrimental consequences of breaking down these silos?

What are the benefits of networking silos instead of breaking them? Using a model similar to an Ethernet network suggests an improved way of exchanging information within a development team.

In this hierarchical organization with networked silos diagram, a portion of the information flows in and out of a central hub. Each silos has an equivalent connection to the hub. This model facilitates the introduction of new processes and tools within an NPD environment. 

This model support concepts such as idea and information management.

Neural Networks

The connections in a neural network differ from those of an network that uses a central hub. In a neural network model, an individual can have from one to many connections with other agents (something that acts within the system). The connections are made and broken dynamically. The 'bandwidth' of the connections between individuals can grow or shrink depending on the qualities of the tasks. 

This team that has connections that have formed like a neural network. Agents are proficient. Communication is efficient. Collaboration is facilitated.

Complex adaptive systems

A complex adaptive system is characterized by:

• Cooperative individual behavior
• Emergence of a community
• Adaptation to feedback
• Use of barriers and attractors

In this complex adaptive system for NPD that uses neural network concepts to facilitate interaction, innovation is facilitated.

An introduction to complex adaptive systems is included in my December 2008 Visions article. For more information on complex adaptive systems, examine the work of Dave Snowden at Cognitive-Edge.

Progressing from a coworker environment to cooperation and then to collaboration

An indiscriminate prescription to 'break down the silos' may not be the best strategy to improve results in a high performance NPD environment. The most effective NPD environments are more than a collection of coworkers juggling multiple assignments in a hierarchical organization. 

A more effective NPD environment facilitates cooperation where agents form a network to develop new products. 

The most effective NPD environments facilitate appropriate collaboration. The interaction of agents produce innovative solutions that are superior to the results of individuals working in isolation. These environments are synergistic. Such an environment is consistent with a complex adaptive system that uses neural network concepts.

To quote a line from Strawberry Fields Forever from the Beatles, the next time I hear a suggestion to improve NPD that includes breaking down the silos, "I think I disagree."

The phrase "I will know it when I see it" is explored in Part 9/10 of the Detrimental Connotations in New Product Development (NPD) series at the PDMA blog.

Under ideal NPD conditions, members of the development team do their best to ensure that an appropriate solution will be presented to the decision maker and that solution will be distinguished from all other candidates. 

When both the NPD problem and the appropriate NPD solution are unknown, there is more risk of failure. A question such as "Within our project constraints, what combination of attributes will form a compelling new product offering?" deserves a more rigorous development approach.

What are the qualities of leaders that inspire trust when they claim to recognize the appropriate solutions? What qualities of the individual contributors are required to ensure that appropriate solutions are presented for evaluation? How does the NPD network improve?

The detrimental connotations in this post originate from:

• Problems with the person making the claim
• Problems with the NPD network

Best Practice is covered in Part 8 of the Detrimental Connotations in New Product Development 10-part October series at the PDMA blog.

The post begins with a review of the PDMA definitions of Best Practice and Benchmarking. Next, the caveat of context is examined.

After contrasting the concepts of correlation and causation, the system types of simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic (popularized by Dave Snowden at Cognitive-Edge) are defined in terms of cause and effect relationships in NPD. 

The detrimental connotations in this post include:

• Mistaking correlation for causation
• Assuming that best practices (which are derived from past practices) can be applied to future development 

The post concludes by contrasting past practices and future capabilities in New Product Development.

The post asks 'Will you know successful NPD if your see it?' 

What does the following illustration suggest about the success of this product launch?

Part 6 of my Detrimental Connotations in New Product Development series has been posted on the PDMA blog. This segment explores several detrimental connotations about Marketing from an R&D perspective within an NPD context. 

It includes the following new graphic in the style popularized by Jessica Hagy at Indexed.

The final section of the post is 'Becoming a more valuable NPD contributor.' 

Part 5 of my Detrimental Connotations in New Product Development series has been posted on the PDMA blog. This segment explores the roles of Designers and Developers in NPD.

This post includes:

• Roles of several types of Designers (including Design school graduates).
• Implications of level-of-mastery (Shuhari)
• Potential collaboration with other team members.
• Pejorative characterizations that tend to cause tension between Designers and Developers.

Part 4 of my Detrimental Connotations in New Product Development series has been posted on the PDMA blog. This segment explores Design.

Within a new product development (NPD) community, the role of design may evoke the realm of aesthetics or more lofty concepts such as the 'driver of innovation.' 

After presenting glimpses of team activities during the design of the on-screen interface portion of a television product, I explore detrimental connotations including:

• Opinions
• Reductionism
• Bias
• False dilemma